Free writing – Saturday, January 17 2026

Saturday on a technicality—the day that I've just lived was Friday, January 16. Writing this post past midnight puts it in the box of Saturday drafts.

Saturday doesn't seem to me like a great day for writing; I would much rather go to the grocer, cook up some big soup to eat throughout the week—I'm thinking kimchi-jjigae. Last week was tonjiru, a pork-belly miso soup. Friday seems a day more suited to writing; as the week tumbles toward its exit, sending it on its way with a reflective written word feels appropriate.

I've been confronted today by the nature of "écriture de soi", or writing of the self. It's something that I love, but it feels terribly self-indulgent. There exists a whole world of things to write about, to learn, to describe; to choose yourself as the most interesting to spill ink on smacks of egocentricity to me...

And yet, I love it.

There's nothing on this earth that I've spent more time with than myself. Why wouldn't I write about myself? I could write about myself endlessly: journals and journals and journals already filled. Admittedly, I love my journals. They're my personal literary body of work: mixtures of poems, essays, drawings; ideas jumping between languages as they seek expression; scribbled lines running off a page, sentences that begin and lead nowhere; a principle that the unsaid holds the most potence. Écriture de soi is a way of reorganizing what you've lived to find coherence—if not coherence, at least a disorganized beauty. It gives you something to reflect on later, excavating a way to forgive yourself.

A few months ago, I brought my journal from age nineteen (originally a calculus notebook!) on the bus with me for reading. Back then, I was convinced that my writing was the stuff of museums, works to be studied in schools: what literary device is employed here? what remains implied? what does this line spacing represent? what is the double-entendre here? But what I wrote was far too embarrassing to share with anyone. Yet so much good art in the world is an unrobing of the self to the other, the unveiling of that pulsating, disgusting thing inside.

So I retain judgment.

There was a guarded tenderness about my writing back then, a quality, singular to the moment that I might never recreate. A lugubre air of preemptive defeat permeates everything I wrote; I refused to reference specific events, and I could only give elegiac impressions of my crumbling inner world at every turn. Any concrete references were cryptic fragments of conversations that only I would remember, a clipping together of the refuse of my life. Why did I talk so much about corkscrews? Excavating? Ashes? Sea foam? A fondness for the adjective "scrunkled"?
Life, for all that it is, is not often exciting on the day-to-day. Everything assimilates; big changes happen through the mundane, and it's ultimately the banal that anchors us as we progress through glacial transformations; a slow passing of the self through its own opposite, resulting in an unrecognizably new self that only feels new under the lens of retrospect.

I'm trying to allow myself to exist a little bit more. If I can at least take up space in writing, then let this be a first way for me to live more.